Sabbatical

Dear Blogger Friends of Pink Cheeks,

Thanks for always tuning in and for your nice comments and enthusiasm about the silly plush things I design.  You have made this stuffed journey of mine so exciting and heart warming, thank you!  I am taking a bigger break than anticipated.  I never fully healed from my repetitive stress injury, and I think it is time I prioritize.  As my own boss of my Pink Cheek business I know I would force my employee to not work through the pain and instead drink more tea and read better books and put her feet up and maybe enjoy the (free) cable she recently discovered she had and let her body recuperate.  I don't know why I have been so hard on myself---it's ridiculous really.  I need to take a very long break and let my ulnar nerve heal properly so that it stops freaking out and making my neck hurt and my fingers tremble.  Thanks for reading, I'll be back some time!

Yours,

Nichol  

Little Tiny Post

I'm going to take a small blog and Pink Cheek break to do some winter hibernating.  For some reason I have been getting home from work exhausted and thinking, "oh I really should be sewing" and I think I need to take the pressure off for a bit and get to a happy place before I start some more Pink Cheeks.  Tomorrow I see a family band where the wife plays the washboard instrument, so I think that will help.  Anyway, I will be back Monday, December 1st with some goods to share!

All the Best,

Nichol

Allison

Allison is a secretary in a fancy, fast-paced ad agency in a huge city with buildings taller than the eye can see.  The people who Allison works for are usually dressed in black and white and have mouths that rarely curl up at the sides to form a smile.  Most days Allison will quietly make xeroxes, coffee and answer questions, but on some days Allison simply can not tolerate the seriousness, so she wears her bear hoodie and her polka dot tights and then counts how many mouths she can make curve upward.

I had a hard time photographing Allison, I don't know why.  I think she is cuter in person.   It has been snowing off and on today.  Snowing!  I'm actually strangely excited even though I really can't stand to be cold and scraping ice off of the windshield of my car gives me the chills and makes me a little grumpy.   But, I am ready for everything to be covered in a blanket of white.  

Allison is available here in my Etsy Shop.

Ma Na Ma Na

Everyone needs to watch this to improve the quality of their Sunday.

Herbert

Ever since he was a little tot, Herbert was attracted to cars.  Whenever his parents couldn't find him in the house, they always ended up finding him underneath the car in the garage looking at all the oily whirly-gigs.   As an adult, Herbert is pretty sure that he is related in some way to Click and Clack (the car-talk brothers on NPR), maybe a long lost cousin-twice-removed or something.  Herbert knows the answers to all the questions people call in to ask Click and Clack.  Sometimes he answers them out loud and pretends to be a part of Click and Clack's dialogue.  One day he will write a letter requesting to be a co-host on the show---his name could be Clonk---and it will be great.

I found that car fabric on Etsy.  It's from Japan--isn't it great? Through out my life I have had extremely bad luck with cars.  I know some people exaggerate when they say things like that, but some of the things that have happened to my cars are so weird and unlucky and strange that they seem unbelievable.  One of my favorite stories is about how some sort of animal ate up through my car engine and actually built some sort of nest there.  I had let someone borrow my car before I found it like this, and I was so furious at first, I thought they had played some bizarre joke on me, but no, an animal actually just made my car's engine their home.  I don't even eat meat, but this animal ate my car---it seemed so wrong to me---and against some sort of karmic law.  

Herbert is here available in my shop!

Edward

Edward is a bit shy with the ladies.  Whenever he comes up to one he would like  to marry, his tongue gets tied up in a knot.  So, Edward did his research and decided in order to become someone's prince, his best bet would be to don a frog hood.

Edward is made of corduroy, cotton and wool.  I'm kind of in love with him.  He looks so vulnerable in his wool frog hoodie.  So, the gray weather outside has started getting to me.  Come on sunshine, come back to me!  It makes me want to put on fluffy slippers and bake away my depression using only the most fattening of pastry ingredients.  

Edward is available right here in my Etsy shop.  Bring him into your home and let him be your prince.

Mary

Mary lives in a mid-sized town in a part of the country that has all four-seasons.  Its summers are very hot and its winters are very cold. Mary dislikes the cold very much, she even keeps a pair of mittens near her refrigerator, so that when she needs to get her cherry ice cream out of the freezer, her hands don't get chilly.  On days when it is gray and cold outside, Mary will stay in bed, drink hot chocolate and pout with her kitten, Toonces, who pouts most days for reasons that Mary is unaware of.  But, for Mary, the winter is saved by the snow.  She loves it.  She'll stay up all night watching it fall and will even brave the cold to venture outside and look straight up into it and imagine that she is the star of her own snow globe.  She didn't believe it at first, when a neighbor informed her that no two snowflakes are alike until she examined each one that fell on her window pane and noticed all the intricate details of each flake.  Toonces, however, remains underwhelmed.  

Mary has been dancing around my sketchbook in various forms for weeks.  It is nice to have my special requests done and be able to get back to sketching and developing new ideas.  

Joseph and I are watching Mad Men on DVD now---it is such a good show, I am really hooked, which is kind of surprising because there is not a single character in the show that I would want to be friends with or even sit next to in a cafe.  Most of them are greedy, snobby, meanies, but still--it is so good.  And, I really want the early sixties style to come back so that I can wear dresses like the girls in the show---they seem like the perfect dress for twirling, plus I bet they would be flattering for girls like me who have some "junk in the trunk".

Mary is available here in my shop.